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Nella Verona del periodo neoclassico gli spettatori avevano a disposizione un vero e proprio menù degli incanti, la cui portata principale consisteva spesso in una compagnia equestre. Poi i virtuosi delle varie discipline del corpo: giocolieri, equilibristi, trapezisti, acrobati e gli spericolati funamboli. Animali ammaestrati, dai rinoceronti alle pulci sapienti. Fenomeni della natura e curiosità etnografiche. Maghi e illusionisti di ogni tipo. Infine un grande assortimento di spettacoli pseudoscientifici come i panorami, o le dimostrazioni della luce elettrica, del telegrafo e le molto amate ascensioni aerostatiche. Il tutto servito in un’inaspettata città scaligera, crogiolo di tendenze, humus di culture, punto di riferimento per compagnie di artisti di ogni genere. Con una serie assai variegata di spazi: dai teatri ufficiali, alle improvvisate baracche, sino all’Arena. È questo il mondo emerso dall’approfondito lavoro di ricerca ed analisi, svolto da un gruppo di titolate ricercatrici, coordinate dai curatori del progetto, le quali hanno setacciato i più importanti archivi di Verona, del Veneto e del Nord Italia, alla ricerca di qualsiasi testimonianza afferente le discipline circensi. Un’esperienza unica nel campo della storiografia dello spettacolo popolare, che ha permesso di riscoprire incredibili repertori, delineare i profili dei principali protagonisti, capire le caratteristiche dei luoghi deputati, delle modalità di fruizione e del relativo riscontro da parte del pubblico e della critica giornalistica.

This research presents an account of a doctoral inquiry undertaken as an embedded practitioner and researcher, in the context of the Circus Oz Living Archive Project, an interdisciplinary research project conducted at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. This project was a three-year investigation into the creation of an online digital ‘living archive’: a collection of historical performance videos, combined with an intention to rethink existing paradigms of contemporary performance archives. As an embedded practitioner and researcher, my doctoral research was led by the question of how might we design a living archive? My approach has been one of research-through-practice, in which I have undertaken the design and creation of a prototype digital archive as both a pragmatic design act and as a research activity. Informed by discourse and literature from a wide range of academic areas, I critically reflect on the work undertaken in the design of this digital archive, in order to investigate some aspects of the roles and agency of an interaction designer engaged in its creation. By bringing together contemporary theories of the performance archive, conceptions of digital practice and digital materiality from the field of Software Studies, and Verbeek’s notion of material hermeneutics (2005), I examine the practice of Interaction Design, in the context of a project concerned with designing and making a contemporary digital performance archive. I argue that the work of a designer in this context is one of mediating hermeneutic relations with the archive through the creation of specific software representations. It is also one of executing agency through the use of performative design artefacts. This is an often opaque, yet powerful role, in which the decisions made by designers—along with the decisions enabled by the work of designers in the day-to-day process of collaboratively making the archive—ultimately affect society’s relation with the archive. The effects of design decisions have implications for contemporary cultural heritage and future cultural understanding. The concept of a ‘living archive’ suggests that the digital archive is not a singular thing to design, but rather an extensible cultural resource that has the capacity to live and be re-designed throughout its life. I also argue that the role of the designer in this process is ultimately one in which they must act with certain intention: in designing a ‘living archive’, designers have a responsibility to engage non-designers in making decisions about the archive’s representation. They also have a responsibility to demystify the process of making software, such that acts of cultural mediation performed by the digital archive can be enacted in well-informed, intentional, and respectful ways. [author summary]